Good Stuff
I just got done with another pass at the BlogAgent. It is running right now on AOL Instant Messenger. I only focused on AOL tonight because I wanted to add the "who" functionality that I wrote about earlier. Because the library that I'm using to access AIM is nice and works great, I can concentrate on the other bits of the code which I had written instead of buggy libraries. I was able to check/enhance/fix the importing of xml and the news bits, add the who stuff and generally give the code a good once over.
Tomorrow, or rather, this weekend, I'm going to go back to Jabber and MSN and see what I can do to get them working now that I've got a decent base to work from. I'd also like to find a Yahoo IM library that seems up to snuff since Yahoo is my favorite IM system. Have you used the WebCam stuff on Yahoo IM? It's great! My parents have been able to keep up with the growth of their only grandson via live weekly telechats using the webcam. It just works perfectly for them and me - no fussing like with NetMeeting. That's cool. Any app that works perfectly for Mom gets my vote (and cash).
The future for BlogAgent depends on a few things: First I want to get the other IMs online, then I want to put them all together in one giant BlogAgent. Then I want to test the reliability over time to see where the problems are. Does the thing suck memory? Does the network time out? Do the updates actually work? Is every 3 minutes too little or too much time? Etc.
Then I want to get feedback to see if anyone's actually using the app. If there's some positive feedback, I'll keep going to see what I come up with.
I just want to harp on the power of open source and Java here for a second. The reason I'm able to put all this together in my spare time during the past few days is because of the great libraries that are out there. I'm also able to post the app to my hosted Linux server and have it work perfectly. I develop on Windows 2000 and then I post the app to a Linux server. It's GREAT. This is how things aught to work. When I'm ready to go back to fix the other agents that don't work (like MSN) I'm going to be able to dive right into the code, understand all of it (no MS mystery .dlls) and find/code the fixes. This is cool. Everything should work this way.
Alright, goodnight!
-Russ